Lytton Strachey's "The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood"

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), a modernist innovator in the art of life-writing and the author of Eminent Victorians (1918), is not known to have had any interest in fairy tales. A previously unpublished 1897 manuscript in the British Library, however, suggests the role that his engagement with them played in his development as a theorist of historiography and an artist in biography. "The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood" shows the stylistic and ideological influence of Edward Gibbon, Charles Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm.